Commentary
“COVID has shown government officials how to do an end-run around the normal system of checks and balances. They simply need to invoke ‘science’ and declare an emergency — and then extend their emergency orders time and again. Anyone who dares challenge the emergency orders will be stigmatized as ‘anti-science,’ or they will be told they aren’t scientists so they have no right to be heard,” writes John G. West in his commentary “The Rise of Totalitarian Science.”
“Regardless of your view of specific anti-COVID policies, policymaking during the pandemic has set a terrible precedent for the future. The genie of unaccountable government power in the name of science has been let out of the bottle. Will we be able to put it back in?”
During the months of full civic tumults and riots that plagued numerous U.S. cities in 2020, mainly the work or Black Lives Matter or the newly emergent curse of the oxymoronically self-named Antifa, the U.S. press was unwonted genteel in their coverage. Recall these mobs took over the central section of Seattle, set up “guards” to determine who could enter, nightly rolled through the downtown, and terrified residents of their liberated “Chazistan.” Businesses were attacked, saw murder and violence, and of course the riots were marked with scorn for and attacks on the police.
Residents of Seattle were, effectively, kept hostage in their own city, this in 21st-century democratic U.S.A.
The mayor of utopian Seattle, during an outbreak of pure lawlessness, put the capstone on the folly by describing it as the beginning of “a summer of love.” A statement—let me coin a word—of such “dim-wititude” that it should be inscribed on granite and put outside the municipal offices under a bust of the mayor. Elsewhere in so many other cities there were nightly rampages, attempts to burn down police buildings, “occupations,” vast destruction of property, and mass looting. The works.
Still the news media were, shall we say, comforting, or fully complacent, downplaying what was in front of their eyes. Everyone who followed the riots will recall the epic moment when a reporter—standing in front of a three-storey building that was one huge torch, flames leaping up into the night sky—gave the immortal judgement, on camera, live: “Fiery, but mostly peaceful.” He was employed by, of course—how could he not be—CNN.
There was six months of this, and the entire time the reporting of the riots and the looting was in the main cowardly, almost overtly supportive, and totally inadequate.
Here in Canada, we have had (as I am writing) six days of protest, in one city, and the dynamic is almost perfectly opposite. The protest has been actually not “mainly” but overwhelmingly peaceful, and the political and major press response, wildly alarmist and ominous.
Ottawa shops remain with their windows intact, no assaults on police stations or police being bombarded with sticks and stones, no “armed patrols” by the truckers telling people where they could go or not go, and a splendid number of rather endearing incidents that have failed to make it to national or local press.
By Rex Murphy
